Motivational Speaker

Glenda Watson Hyatt shares her
experiences living with cerebral palsy to
motivate and inspire others to think about
how they perceive their own situation and
their own world around them. She does all
this by typing with only her left thumb!

Electronic books or ebooks are a great way to share your expertise and to generate an income. However, how many are sitting on computer hard drives around the world, unread? Your work and expertise wasted.

To minimize paper clutter, I rarely print ebooks. Instead, I prefer reading them on my computer. However, that typically means much scrolling from page to page, which requires fairly fine muscle control â€“ and some days I donâ€™t have it.

Even worst are ebook with column layouts as they require constantly scrolling up and down.

Many ebooks are sitting in my electronic library, unread. Who knows the gems of wisdom wasting away in there!

What was the difference? The page orientation was landscape, not portrait! I was amazed by how turning the page sideways made such a huge difference. Hitting the â€œnext pageâ€ button was all that I had to do. It was so easy, so refreshing.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the commonly used format for creating ebooks. However, for many individuals, PDF means Pretty Damn Frustrating. Creating accessible PDFs will be covered in a future Accessibility 100 post.

Accessibility 100 is a series of 100 easy-to-implement, free and inexpensive tips for improving accessibility for people with disabilities. This is a community project. Feel free to leave your comments, questions and ideas for future Accessibility 100 posts.

It’s amazing how the simplest little things make life so much easier!

Comment by Glenda

April 2, 2009 @ 2:49 pm

Yes, definitely amazing! I would have never guessed flipping the page would make that much difference.

April 3, 2009 @ 3:56 am

Glenda, if you’ve having trouble flipping pdf pages, there’s a product called AirTurn, which is a wireless pedal switch designed for pianists to turn pages hands-free when reading music from tablet pcs. It might just make your ebook-page-flipping easier. Here’s their website:

April 7, 2009 @ 5:27 pm

I think better to produce pdf version for small screen device targeted. And it’s different with the desktop version.

April 21, 2009 @ 5:46 pm

Have you checked out Adobe Reader’s Reflow command? It takes the text (when the PDF is properly formatted) and reflows it to fit the screen width, no matter how much magnification there is. This is much easier to use on the computer. See this post for more details:pogue asks why are pdfs still in portrait orientation.